Word stars

Although noted long ago, the chasm between our society’s two great disjoint cultures – science and art – remains today as wide as ever.  Science and technology affect us more each year, but many of the West's intelligentsia hold it no great omission to know nothing of the principal achievements of either.  They are happy to enjoy the benefits of electricity, powered transport, communications, computers and the rest, without understanding any of them.  But replace these concepts with some from the world of art – Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century French poetry, classical music, the cinema of Kurosawa – and every one of them would be outraged at the very suggestion of ignorance in these fields.

This snobbery, born largely of fear, is nowhere more marked than in the realm of computers.  When they are acknowledged at all it is only to deprecate the dehumanising influence they purportedly have, and the threat they pose to mankind.  Apart from being ridiculous in its paranoia, it is also sad because what is lost through this attitude is nothing less than a complete new art form, with its own rules, its own beauties and its own masterpieces – precisely what is prized elsewhere.  The blindness to these is akin to the establishment’s continuing condescension towards jazz, seen vaguely as some kind of lowly entertainment rather than an entire culture with a musical development – albeit compressed – as rich as any other.

The art of computers – or rather of the programs which run on them – took off with the arrival of the personal computer at the end of the 1970s.  The appearance of these machines was comparable in impact to the democratisation of writing in the Renaissance.  Literature flourished when it entered the public domain, and was not the jealously-guarded preserve of the clerics.  The same process occurred with computer software, previously the prerogative of the huge mainframe sites, the monasteries of this new technology.

Appropriately enough, then, one of the earliest program written for the new micros was called the Electric Pen, a word-processing program.  A few years later came a rather more powerful word processor: WordStar – perhaps the first truly popular and hence universal computer program.  In a way it is the Moll Flanders of the personal computer software world.  It more or less defined a genre its predecessors had only hinted at.

The next evolutionary step – the Tom Jones of its time – was Word Perfect.  In style this was far more modern, and its relative simplicity soon made it a huge public success.  More recently it has been challenged by a new generation of word-processing software, led by products such as Word for Windows.  This is the Roderick Random of its age: fast-moving, slick and generally very approachable.  But the masterpiece of this genre is not even a word processor, or rather it is if you bend the rules.  Quark Xpress is actually a desktop publishing package – and the best – for page layout; but it is so powerful, so original, and so enjoyable to use that against all expectations it also happens to be the best word processor too.  It is, in fact, the Tristram Shandy of its world.  And anyone who has not used the program is missing out as much as anyone who has not read the book.

(15.3.92)

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